Dislikes, Right Data, and the Changing Marketing Landscape - What We're Reading This Week

Dislikes, Right Data, and the Changing Marketing Landscape

Online retail is expected to be at par with the physical stores in the next five years: The way of the future is clearly to commit fewer resources towards opening brick-and-mortar stores and instead, manifesting into virtual ones. As a result, online e-commerce marketers are constantly straddling between engaging with consumers whilst being agile in managing their online reputation.

Over 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last year alone. Somewhere in this enormous swell of data are important time-sensitive digital signals that can tell you what your prospective customers want and need and which ones are likely to buy and when.
It’s not just about how much data you can gather. Rather it’s about identifying, aggregating and processing the right blend of data to predict actions, prescribe activities and use the results to vastly improve marketing results over time – from ROI to revenue.

Today, buyers are connecting with brands on their websites, on social media, through events and retail locations, watching videos, and so much more that it’s becoming hard to track exactly when or where a customer enters the buying cycle. As a result, marketers are under mounting pressure to better understand how they connect with their customers, where they connect with them, and what the best content strategy is on each platform.

Predictive analytics hasn’t just changed the game for marketing professionals — it has fundamentally reinvented it. While many organizations are implementing predictive marketing analytics and seeing incremental gains, such as an uptick in customer retention rates or improved customer engagement scores, they may not be reaping the full revenue and profits that potential predictive marketing analytics can ultimately deliver.

The study, Marketing is a (Buyer) Journey, Not a Destination, also found that CMOs are increasing their budgets and allocating a greater portion across the entire customer journey rather than into individual channels. More than half (57%) said they expect their marketing budgets to increase over the next two to three years.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg Tuesday announced that the social media giant would acquiesce to the many user requests for a “dislike” button. That poses a quandary for retail marketers that use the site to announce products and initiatives, display advertising, and interact with customers.

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